Blog

Categories

Search

Redesigned with you in mind, a clearer and easier to use Statcounter.

It’s our mission to make Statcounter the most useful, engaging and easy to use analytics app for our members. This update is just one of many improvements we have lined up to help make it easy for you to understand your visitors and make the most informed decisions about your website.

Clarity and ease-of-use.

While there are some new features and functional improvements in this update, the most substantial changes are to the look and feel of the Statcounter user interface. Redesigned from the ground up, we’ve placed priority on clarity and ease-of-use by improving the layout, typography, colours, icons, spacing and visual hierarchy.

See the wood for the trees.

New headline stats show you important summary information at a glance.

Compare and contrast.

A refreshed projects page makes it easier for you to compare trends across your projects.

Absolutely, Peter. Statcounter gives you detailed information about where your visitors are coming from including Country, Region / State, City, ISP, IP Address, Referring URL. That hasn’t changed from the previous version. You can now also set up alerts for when individual visitors view your website!

I HATE the changes. This was certainly not done with me in mind so you lie. I hope you let us keep the option to keep using the old style. I really am too lazy to change to another service but if these changes go mandatory I will have to find another. Guess I’ll start looking now.

I prefer the old design. I can’t tell what days are included in the date range. I have to keep an eye on date/time so I know when to download the stats to my computer. The old design makes it simple to know at-a-glance.

Ok, first NO ONE designed anything “with me in mind.” I say that because NO ONE ASKED ME.

The site is fine as it is. PLEASE don’t go “updating it” to the point my old version of safari won’t work. (Already happening, and I HATE using firefox.)
All I want or need is a quick easy way to see how many hits on a page, and when possible where they came from. Google has already managed to ruin that. Search terms are now question marks. Swell. But I don’t need or want anything else.

Next, putting up a window asking me to turn off my adblocker IS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN!
I have AD BLOCK for a REASON. YOU may get paid to blast ads, BUT NOT ME! It’s MY bandwidth being chewed up for crap I have no intention or desire to look at.
Want me to view ads? PAY ME!!!!
And if your site ever becomes unusable because of this, so be it. I’ll do without.
Your site is easier and quicker to see what I need to see than the stats provided by my web host. But I do have them. If your site vanished, be a shame, but no great loss.
NO I WILL NOT BE LOOKING AT COMMERCIALS!!!!!! GET IT? We cut cable TV a few years ago mainly because of all the bullshit-ads. NO MORE!

The feedback tab in StatCounter is the main source of feedback we get from our users. We get multiple feedback messages daily and we read every one. This is why we say “redesigned with you in mind” – every design decision is based on feedback from our users combined with design expertise and data analysis of how Statcounter is being used. Should you wish to contribute to the feedback in the future, the tab is located in the bottom right corner of Statcounter. Some of our most popular features have started life as a suggestion via the feedback tab!

We’d love to remove the ads for everyone but they do help us keep the free version of Statcounter available and enable us to keep improving the product. The next plan up at €4 / $5 has no ads and a range of additional features.

About the feedback button, just my guess… Don’t you think that based on the total of users, maybe, just maybe a 5% of those give feedback and the other 95% is happy with what they have and that is the reason they don’t give feedback, less for changes?

Do you think that that is thinking of us in mind? No, this is as YouTube does: “oh, we heard your feedback”, wait, what feedback?, oooh, you mean those that complain for not having an eye candy bloated interface and not compatible backwards, or that removes functionality, oh, yes, that feedback :/

Sorry for my rant, is only that I hate changes that removes functionality for eye candy. Or more than functionality, light interface to check just visits.

Oh, and, by the way I don’t have a wide screen. Now it is designed for widescreen, yes or yes. Very bad use of responsive CSS, if you ever used it for this new redesign.

You say, use the feedback button… what for?, are you going to offer a light version? No, probably not, so, again, sorry for my rant, but I won’t bother to not being heard.

You’re right, the feedback tab is used by a small percentage of users but we have it there so our users can contribute to the direction of Statcounter. People give us feedback to say they are happy about some things, not happy about other things and to suggest features. Sometimes just to say thanks. However, we can’t assume that the large percentage of users who do not use the feedback tab do not want Statcounter to progress and grow and move with the times. The overwhelming majority of the feedback we’ve received through the feedback tab since the redesign has been positive. Also, as I said previously, the feedback we get is one factor that feeds into design decisions. Other important factors include design best practices and data analysis of how people are using Statcounter.

Eye-candy is not what we’re about. At all. We’re about making web analytics easy. We put you, the user, at the centre of every design decision. We release changes to a small percentage of users first and get feedback before rolling out gradually to more users, modifying and improving as we go. Visual changes to fonts, colours, spacing and layout are all intended to improve clarity and ease of use. The majority of changes in this update were visual, and that’s because we have some great new features to launch over the coming year and we wanted to get the basics right first with a strong visual language that we can apply to all new functionality.

Our web/desktop app isn’t fully responsive yet but we have added a way to hide the left navigation sidebar which hopefully helps a bit on narrower resolutions. We do also have iOS, Android and Windows mobile apps available from the various app stores.

We haven’t removed any functionality in this version as far as I’m aware. If there’s something you can’t find, please get in touch so we can help.

Could you elaborate on your request for a “light interface to check just visits”?

To light I mean, I know, we are in 2017 (and I understand it, that is the reason I was apologizing with my rant), but like it was about a decade were you could check stats without missing javascript functionality.

For example, the side bar you talk. Ok, let’s hide it. Oooopss, we can’t. Ok, enable JS. Ooops, we can’t. Damn, the script is at a third party CDN. jQuery=waste of (~300K)bytes of a full api for little toggles.

After that, you can hide thanks to a cookie forever (if I’m not wrong, didn’t test that) but if you want to use again, enable everything.

Have in mind that the side bar is now 220px or almost 1/4 of a 1024 screen. It’s my fault.

Oh, also, I’d never understand the ultra huge elements eating the screen everywhere too. Are tiny on high DPI/big screens? use a relative metric.

I know, I’m ranting again, but what I pretended to say is that you could add CSS :hover dropdown menu to access the rest of stats. That is lighter and that will let all the screen to the stats.

You might be thinking now, but without JS you miss things, yes, true, but usually I check the “Visit paths” and a few other and I don’t need much JS for that, unless I want to browse something else that I do once a year.

In other words, the same was available, more or less, about a decade and it was lighter, indeed.

Sure, in the past the server did most of the work to serve data, and now sites usually rely on client APIs and/or JS, but that is exactly what removes lightness (I talk about the graph). And it is my fault to have an old PC but we can’t all be to the top.

Anyway, sorry, again, for my rants.

This is progress and grow and I’m not saying stop and keep it forever, just that some of us can’t follow it. But it looked lighter and simpler in the past than now.

Well, Jonathan, maybe if you’re thinking about making changes based on what a ‘small percentage’ say, you could send out an email like this one and let the rest of us know well before the change has already been decided. Then you can determine if the changes recommended by the few are what the many really want.

@Steve Like I mentioned, our method for gauging the success of changes with a larger sample of users is to roll out new changes gradually to 5% of users, then 10%, 20% etc, explaining the benefits of the changes, collecting feedback and modifying along the way. This gives us a really clear indication of “what the many really want”.

Admiration for your development work!
I do however have as question outside of this new development:
I entertain several websites A, B, C etc. To each of them another statcounter-account is attributed. Some of them are interlinked. What worries me is the question: if a user opens website A and uses a link to website B contained in website A: does statcounter count the hit on page A only or does webcounter also list a hit for page B ? Thanks for your trouble !